Baby Letter N

One of the many hidden picture master artists for Highlights Magazine, Tim Davis, recently celebrated the birth of his grandson. To join in the celebration, a group of Highlights for Children Magazine illustrators each depicted a letter of the baby's name with a hidden picture drawing. My letter was N, so I decided to feature a young artist (like his Grandpa) sporting three sticks of chalk to form the letter N and a chalk board background.

Like my other work, I started with a simple thumbnail sketch...

and then did line drawings of the images to scale. In the sketching process, my ideas always evolve and the original idea grows into something new. The pencil sometimes leads me in an entirely different direction than my starting point. For example, my original idea was to hide the words (that begin with N) on the baby’s shirt, but after finishing a thumbnail sketch, I decided a chalkboard would be best for the hidden words.
 

After sketching, my next step is to scan the drawings individually and place them in a Photoshop document. This becomes my final sketch which is then painted in Photoshop using the Cintiq. The fun part of this project was to paint and play with new brushes in Photoshop, trying to create the 'look' of chalk dust on the blackboard.

Congratulations to Tim and the Davis family on your new grandchild!
I hope you like the letter N.